campaignsfandomcom-20200223-history
Education
That education is vital part of our nations future is without doubt. It is clear that in order to remain competitive economically, we need an educated populace. The methods of achieving that populace need to be reexamined. However, how we define education, and perhaps more importantly, how the political system interacts with education is of primary interest. Among the issues: * What is education? * What are the goals of education? * Are educational goals the same for everyone everywhere? * Who should teach? * What is the role of private education? * What is the role of public education? * How do politicians portray education? * What is true about education (separating fact from fiction)? * What is equal education? * How should education be funded? * Cost of education by countries * Does the government have any role in providing or funding education? =Public Education= Every child should have access to the level of education necessary to allow them to actively contribute to society through work and/or volunteering and to maintain life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. * Some Goals of Elementary Education * Some Goals of Secondary Education * Funding Public Education After several decades of increasing federal influence in education, some have begun to argue that is time for the federal, state, and/or local governments to back out. They argue that despite ever increasing funding, there are no data to support the theory that the government has improved public education. Some would like to see educational funding revert entirely to state and local municipalities. Others would like to see all levels of government get out of fundign education, and have parents pay for educating their children, just as they pay for feeding their children. In the short term, this would create a system shock, as many districts would suffer funding shortages. Over time, you would see a transformation of many districts. In areas that attract educated people, you would see more school choices, as entrepreneurs entered the field in order to capitalize on the demand. There would also be an increase in philanthropic funding from businesses, as they respond to meet their workforce needs. School voucher systems are potentially a middle ground between the current federal system and one that is either entirely local or entirely private. Schoolchoices.org argues for a completely private, market-based system. However, a vouchers implementation need not exclude federally run schools. It would, however, assure that those schools improved or be unfunded. * Teacher Compensation Teacher compensation is another bone of contention. Currently the vast majority of teachers have salaries determined by seniority. There are increasing movements http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&contentId=93346 to make salaries more merit-based. This presents the difficulty of determining what standard of merit should be used for these judgements. The need for some way of measuring students' ability is something that the No Child Left Behind act is attempting to address. Other interested parties may have proposed other metrics. Teacher's unions, often very powerful politically, have consistently opposed the implementation of merit-based pay systems for teachers. They have killed propositions in California and other systems by using their substantial political clout and portraying such measures as 'anti-education'. One has to wonder if students would agree. Most other fields of employment are compensated on a combination of seniority and merit, weighted toward merit, and there is no reason why education should be any different. * Public Education Standards Education standards must apply to all states and districts. Standards will keep states and districts from falling behind. No child from one state or district should be privilege to a "better" education than any child from other states or districts. Developing a national standard for public education is difficult because different geographical areas have different educational resources avaliable; towns and cities with large universities and a surplus of colleges tend to attract more (and more highly eductated) teachers and educational resources that are more difficult to quantify than tax dollars. It is impossible to give every person access to the same quality of education, even without considering the effect of family, friends, and other social influences on a person's eductaion. Nationally uniform education standards inherently favor people from certain geographical areas and socioeconomic strata. * Year Round Schooling Summer breaks are an anachronistic vestige of our agrarian past: students used to require summers off so they could help their parents harvest summer crops. Our current school system spends a considerable time of the new school year re-teaching everything from last year that the students forgot over the summer. Instead of the large summer break, year round schooling should be adopted, giving more regular, but shorter, breaks. The primary educational benefit of YRE is that it facilitates continuous student learning. Source: Year-Round Education. ERIC Digest, Number 68 Students who attend year-round school rate slightly higher in retaining learned material. Source: Year-Round School Gives Kids a Boost, Duke Expert Says On the other hand trying to teach during the summer months can be ineffective and even detrimental to children and the overall education process. Counter Point to Year Round Schooling Schools are taught by people who value academic education, often above all else. They are thus very good at preparing people for academic life, but often do not succeed for students with aptitudes in the fine arts, mechanical tinkering, or the like. Summer breaks allow for a long enough time period for students with such aptitudes to attend serious theater/dance/arts conservatories, or to experiment with apprenticeship programs and internships. One could further argue for expanding summer breaks, along with an increase in internship programs for high school students, in order to better prepare students for the many potential careers that only loosely depend on the skills taught in schools. * Private Education Private education plays an important role in the United States, especially for the upper strata of our economic structure. First, What Are We Trying to Achieve? Before we take sides, I'd like to know what the objectives of public/private education actually are for less than college or trade-school education. For instance, are we talking about "no child left behind?" (minimum achievement), or are we talking about "opening up higher education opportunities for gifted but economically challenged students", or "what our industy needs from students just entering the work force", or "we need self-sufficient citizens that constructively add to our culture", etc.? However strange it may seem, I have found that the U.S. Dept. of Education does not have a top-level set of goals, only prescriptive sub-objectives in order to meet governing laws that keep the process in bounds. It seems to me that arguing public vs. private education is secondary to understanding what the desired end state is. For Private Education This section was created for balance. Feel free to remove this comment and add information that is for private education. Content suggestions: Possibly Home-schooling, Benefits (May be religious - not allowed to worship in a public school, for instance), etc. Against Private Education Despite the failure of the Public School System, privatizing the school system is not the panacea many hope it is. Arizona’s charter school system has created a plethora of private organizations creating schools for the sole purpose of the easy federal dollars they bring in. The teachers are still underpaid, the administration is made up almost entirely of board members with exorbitant salaries, the children are still not getting the education they need, and involved parents are seen as an annoyance. * Education as a Personal Goal The supposition here is that the state should set standards for education. The Declaration of Independence indicates that this Union was founded on the unalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Included in these rights is the freedom to decide what one's own goals are, and generally the right to pass on social mores and customs to one's posterity. There are numerous educational goals including socialization, culturalization, and professionalization. One can pursue an education to satisfy any or all of the three. It is also conceivable that one would choose to pursue no education. It is therefore inappropriate to confiscate the earnings of an individual in order to establish an institution that is not held to be of use to all who contribute. Privatization allows for the users to determine which establishments meet their educational needs. Moving resources through a redistribution system in order to meet the goals of a national Educational Department is a solution that will satisfy only a small percentage of the population. * public education The Public School System has some spectacular failures, to be sure, but to gloss over the entire system as failed is a bit myopic (incidentally, it would be equally myopic to call it an unqualified success). The United States Department of Education presents some interesting statistics about the real story of schools and public education in America. Here's some links to look at: http://www.nea.org/edstats/ http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/ http://165.224.221.98/ Part of the trouble in Public School System is the relationship between the media and Public School System. Failures are enthusiastically covered, while successes are not. Moreover, Politicians highlight failings in public education when they are running for office. A more discerning look at this issue is important in order for us to have an intelligent discussion about it. Category:Education * Specialization during high school Here's my personal experience with specialization during high school: During NPR's All Things Considered show for April 11, 2006 Florida Public Radio's Ami Difiore covered a new law in Florida that will require high school students to specialize in a specific course of study. Many people are concerned that high school students will face greater challenges of selecting a "major" than most college students constantly endure. Another valid concern is that specializing students too early will stifle their chances of acquiring a broad knowledge and experience base. However, some argue that if students focus on specific courses they will have better preparation for certain jobs if they do not pursue post-secondary education (collegiate or vocational). Specialized courses of study during high school can have both beneficial and detrimental effects upon students, but I "selected a major" during high school and had a very positive experience. I attended the Academy of Science and Technology (AST) -- a member of the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science, and Technology (NCSSSMST) -- in the Conroe Independent School District (CISD) as a high school student while living in the Houston, Texas area. The academy specialized in math, science, and technology as a high school student as a magnet program -- that was not based on any socioeconomic metric -- that drew students from all of my district's high schools. Students like me successfully applied through a competitive process during our eighth grade year to attend this program which was hosted at one high school. I immensely enjoyed my time at the academy because it enabled me to get to know students who had similar interests in math, science, and technology. The academy requires its students to take courses in these disciplines from our program's staff -- including additional requirements like computer science and scientific research methods. In order to graduate from the program students also have to devote some of their elective credits to special courses only offered by the program while participating in group or individual competitions or projects each year. If that isn't enough, students further have to go on several field trips in order to complete the program's graduation requirements. While the academy's students are more focused than other students in the district, most like me enjoy the ability to explore subjects more deeply while enjoying the mentoring of the small faculty. Looking back at my own experience, another great thing about this program was that my fellow students and I weren't geeks -- as some might think. We were very active in extracurricular activities through the high school that houses the academy. I was amazed at how many of us either played a sport or an instrument (I ran cross country and track). In addition to athletics and arts, the program had students who were cheerleaders, ROTC cadets, leads in plays, club officers and presidents, among other normal high school positions. We even had a homecoming queen my sophomore year. The program clearly attracted students who were more than just interested and gifted in math, science, and technology. Beyond all of these wonderful opportunities, the academy taught me something about myself. I found out that I didn't want to pursue a college degree or a career in math, science, or technology. Granted, I would have found this out early in college if I had a normal high school curriculum, but this became clear to me much sooner. Thus, I was able to focus on finding something else that I was interested before I started college. Fortunately, I was able to focus on another discipline from the beginning of my college career while earning my degree in that subject. For these reasons and many more, I'm glad that I participated in the Academy of Science and Technology. The academy didn't turn me off to math, science, and technology, it helped me understand that I wasn't meant to focus on them. Specialization during high school can easily have very positive effects on students. Luckily, my experience was positive.--Anhhung18901 03:21, 7 July 2006 (UTC) * Research Proposals Teaching lab grant To test the validity of teaching techniques a set of annual teaching lab grants is proposed. Every year a set of teachers will be nominated to participate. They will attend summer classes to train them in the methods under study. The following school year 15 random students will be selected (with parental approval) from the school to be used for the study. At the end of the school year the instructor will create a final report of the students progress, and the students will be given free summer school, free after school tutoring for the next year, and a guaranteed class size of no more than 15 students to offset any learning problems during the study. =Perspectives= (Share your feedback about this section's format/content on the discussion page!) As a way of starting a deeper conversation around Education, please post your "Perspective" below. This will give us a clear structure for looking at all the diverse and interesting perspectives we all hold. Each Perspective should be formatted as follows: "I am _______, and I believe _______." EXAMPLE: "I am a student, and I believe we should have more money for music in our schools." EXAMPLE: "I am a businessman, and I believe the government should give out vouchers for private school." EXAMPLE: "I am a teacher, and I think teachers need to be paid more, trained better, and given more support." Let's keep this civil, thoughtful and friendly... and have fun! What's YOUR perspective? Remember to "sign" your comment with four tildes :: * I am a university faculty member. I think the biggest problem with public education is the lack of competition. It's not funding (we spend more per student than any other industrialized nation by far). It's no secret that the key to high quality and low prices is competition. Right now, we have a non-competitive system. We should allow parents (not bureaucrats) to decide which school to send their students to, and schools should be allowed to compete for the best students (this is similar to the system in Japan and in Europe). Education subsidies should be given to parents to use at any school (public or private). Subsidies should not be allowed to be used at religious-affilitated schools, unless they provide a secular education open to all students of any faith. 66.32.47.112 22:22, 9 July 2006 (UTC) :: *I am an undergraduate student at the University of South Florida and I believe that we should broaden the possibilities of our little budding scientists, philosophers, medical students, computer scientists, etc. (any and all fields open to advancement) by placing increasingly less weight on numbers (eg. GPA's and Standardized tests) and open up possibilities to our youth to apply themselves in going beyond what any such number can merit them. I certainly know that there are undergraduate students and occasionally (albeit, extraordinarily rarely) high school students who have published fantastic papers and works of independent (or even dependent or collaborative) research in refereed journals and other media of published literature. Let us not forget the purpose of education! Similarily one can easily point to a young student with excellent such numbers and yet knows nothing else (it is a pathetic sight to watch young people strive for the 'higher grade' and completely miss the purpose of their education, to truly understand what is attemptedly being conveyed to them). It is an endless pool of trivia to our "greatest of students"! GPA's and Standardized Test scores will soon long be forgotten, but how will one render oneself a well-constituted contributor to the advancement of knowledge and the human race in general if not through the application of ones knowledge? ..to allow students to take full advantage and harness their motivation to truly learn, to stop "satisfying" the poor requirements and methods of formal education and overcome it, to allow those who have the motivation and willingness to go beyond, to manifest genius in oneself! ...Lastly I would like to say that Wikipedia has certainly taken a step ahead in the way our young people (and indeed, everyone!) acquire information and attempt to truly learn by harnessing their own motivation to understand the world. :: *I'm a public educator, and education presents a very complex system resistant to change, and certainly hardened against simple initiatives and reform programs. It's often used as a whipping post by politicians looking to score easy political points. Highly qualified teachers, with good pay and small class size are a good start. I'm also concerned about the role of educational unions. While they protect employees, I don't see them fighting to push their members to be better teachers - instead I see them fighting for more days off, more pay, fighting for 3 or 4 minutes of planning time, etc. I'm not saying unions are bad, by the way, I just don't see them pushing members to be better. Bmackenty 11:56, 7 July 2006 (UTC) :: *I'm a life coach, and I believe that the federal government should dedicate more funds to education. :: *I'm a future parent and present uncle, and I think that when the government has primary responsibility for teaching children, it will tend to teach the children to be uncritical of politicians and maintain the status quo. :: *I'm a high school student. I think that the government should focus on giving more funds to areas with low graduation rates and low test scores, so as to give those students more educational opportunities to succeed. :: *I am a medical student with a elementary age child and a baby. I am a strong believer that one of the fundamental missions of our government (both federal and state) is to educate our citizenry. This is one of the main reasons why we should pay taxes. We all should contribute to ensure that our country remains a leader in education. In contrast to the views of many teachers and local school boards, I think that we should have strong national standards and national testing with uniform exams so that there cannot be local artificial manipulation of scores and achievement. While we should always cultivate artistic talents in children with school offerings like drama, music and art, we cannot ignore the fundamental need to produce educated students who can read complex materials, who can write clearly and succintly and who understand math and science. But goals like these require money. And that has to come from taxpayers. Nick 22:28, 6 July 2006 (UTC) :: *I am a high school student. I believe the current educational system creates a lack of competition resulting in a backwards educational system. Students options for vocational training is limited, students with special needs are not having those needs met and gifted students do not have the oppurtunity to be challenged. I beleive the remedy is to shut down all public schools and divide equally their allocated funds among all citizens with childrens as an "educational voucher" with which enrollement any of the now numerous by neccesity private schools could be funded. Such an endeavour would create a competitive marketplace in which schools competed for potential students. :: *I am a son of an elementary special education teacher, and I am confused why she cannot get work merely because she has a MS in Special Education. Her graduate degree and years of teaching experience mean that school districts must pay her more, but when principals have tight budgets they'll take young teachers with only undergraduate educations and no teaching experience. I appreciate the financial side of the issue, but why are we putting money in front of more extensive training and experience?--Anhhung18901 03:14, 7 July 2006 (UTC) *I am an educator and I believe that teachers must be tested regarding two things: 1) knowledge of the subject(s) they teach and 2) real teaching ability. Many US teachers would pass the first and fail the second. Teaching is NOT a knowledge-based job, no matter what the NEA says. Teaching is a social interaction job, and needs to be understood that way. I have seen plenty of "stupid" people do a better job of teaching than the doctorate-level educators who cannot communicate with children. Pay is NOT the issue. Social incompetence is. 69.19.14.40 12:07, 7 July 2006 (UTC)JohnCorbin :: * I am a former high school student, and i believe that public education is less catered to learning and more catered to preparing students for middle economy. Teachers are issuing homework because they're told instead of homework that would help with retention and understanding difficult concepts. Assessment scales are built on how well you can complete the task given to you in the time alotted, not an assessment on the knowledge of the concept. public education is busier producing drones then productive members of society. :: * I am a college educator, and I believe that public schools need to stop granting funds based on standardized testing. Aside from being culturally biased, standardized tests DO NOT demonstrate anything other than how well students can memorize answers to test questions. The funds granted to schools with high performance makes the "best" schools (with students who can memorize and/or teachers who can teach students to memorize) more equipped and the "worst" schools less equipped to "succeed." Instead, schools should focus on teaching students to think critically about information, society, and themselves. This focus shift will create smarter students and a more engaged populace. In order to do this, schools need teachers who are dedicated. I meet so many "educators" who simply do not care about the children they teach. I'm not blaming teachers; I'm simply saying that our system runs most teachers so ragged that they can no longer function as educators, and the students suffer. The system needs a GIANT overhaul, and I am probably not qualified to make suggestions, but I think a good start would be to cater to the students who are present in schools NOW instead of the students who were present 60 years ago. We need tech-savvy schools, mandatory summer education programs, teaching styles that engage students (who may have short attention spans!) to learn effectively. High Schools may also benefit from a later starting time and more student-centered classrooms. If you are interested in finding out more, please see www.standup.org 75.3.157.17 14:10, 7 July 2006 (UTC) I am a soon-to-be-recent college graduate and I believe the current educational system is doomed to failure. We have created a socialized system in which teachers, regardless of pay scale or school funding, are often relegated to being little more than babysitters, or, to put it more precisely, wardens. To properly resolve the issue of declining educational quality in our country, we must address the following issues: 1) There are more children being created than there are new teachers of even marginal skill. This teacher-to-student imbalance is inevitable, only a revolution in teaching methods and a radical upswing in the social and intellectual abilities of teachers can fix this issue. 2) Teaching, as a profession, is too often seen as a 'last-resort' career for those who find they cannot excel in their chosen field. 3) Teachers are not paid enough, and the profession is held in too-low esteem to encourage the brightest and best among us to become teachers. (see 2) 4) Higher academics has become a cloistered world in which elitist, often separatist intellectuals entice the best to join their ranks, whilst handing out nearly-meaningless rubber stamps to those who choose to return to "the world". (Herman Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" should be required reading for all college freshmen) To remedy these problems there are surely many approaches. I would suggest: 1) Create a nationally- (or even internationally) -recognized standard of analytical faculty and factual accumulation that is expected of any child by age 18. The best and most respected teachers and educators at each age level from across the world should be invited to participate in the establishment of these standards. 2) Enforce said standards (1) ruthlessly, constantly adjusting testing methods and the corpus data to include contemporary events/discoveries, as well as to maintain as closely as possible a perfect bell-curve distribution of results around a center. This distribution should be achieved without mathematical adjustment, up to and including social/ethnic/cultural "bonuses" or "penalties" for students from certain cities/regions/countries. 3) Make the entire corpus available online, for free**, in many languages. It should be text-based with ample video and graphical accompaniment 4) The corpus should teach a syncretic view of history, with science, philosophy, mathematics, and arts taught not as separate subjects, but by both region and era. The goal of this would be to give a thorough, globally-oriented, and historically accurate view of humankind's discoveries, innovations, and conflicts from the beginnings of history through to the present day. The focus would always be on giving a temporal context to the developments and activities of all regions of the world. By teaching in a syncretic, temporally-sensitive fashion, students would be given a sense of the overall progression of world history, and could see both the parallels and the imbalances in the progress of every area in the world throughout history. 5) Students would be expected to be self-taught, with guidance from their parents/caretakers/etc, as well as from organized, supervised study sessions. Students would also be welcome to seek "mentors" in the form of professors, professionals, and other experts, who would make their knowledge available via online access. This could be done for a fee, or pro-bono, as each mentor desired. (Note that this system does away almost entirely with the traditional concept of primary schooling and the teaching profession as we know it). 6) Students could progress through the fields of study at any rate they choose, and once complete, they could apply for admission to institutions of higher education. 7) Finally, the tests would be standardized, taken online, and would employ so-called "adaptive testing". As a student does better, the questions would become harder, more detail-oriented, and more heavily emphasize critical thinking skills. This would be one method used to help guarantee an accurate bell-curve-like distribution about the center. This is simply a brief outline of the most serious of the current problems I have observed from my own (admittedly priveleged) education and development, as well as my own (admittedly idealized) vision of how education should and must adapt to create a dynamic, intelligent, globalized generation of new thinkers. 24.160.171.120 22:08, 8 July 2006 (UTC)David Sabo24.160.171.120 22:08, 8 July 2006 (UTC)